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10 Ways to Conduct the Perfect UX Workshop
Stickies, colorful cursors and a few good practices can truly create magic in a product
In the beginning of the year, my UX team at Microsoft faced an unconventional ask: Two organizations of Dev + PMs could not come to an agreement and turned to us to act as the impartial party that would help them reach consensus. This was unprecedented. For once, the final solution would entail a significant investment for the company, and it was exciting to see our partners wanting to defer to our UX team in seek for the best experience for our users.
To achieve this, we conducted a set of hybrid workshops across time zones, that reached over +60 participants! From that point on, other product teams came to us asking to reproduce the exercises at a smaller scale. My team invested in several templates for workshop activities in Figjam, intake forms and dedicated guidance. In other words, we slowly became “The workshop pros” in the studio.
I am excited to share some of the tips that we found most helpful overtime to conduct successful workshops, no matter the scale, complexity or outcome:
1) Before starting, understand the problem and pick your exercises carefully
A workshop should not be just a sticky board game. If done correctly, a workshop is a set of guided activities meant to bring clarity to product teams. For this reason, is imperative to dedicate some time to chat with your product teams and understand what the goal is they are trying to achieve. This should help narrowing down which workshop (and therefore what kind of activities) are needed. Extracted from the Nielsen Norma Group, here’s a cheat sheet of the most common workshop types:
Start by clearly defining the problem that needs to be solved. This could be a design challenge, a user pain point, or a business goal. Once the problem is defined, brainstorm what the ideal solution might look like. This gives the workshop a clear direction and helps participants align their ideas towards a common goal.
